Bangkok Banks Joins Marco Polo Trade Finance Initiative

The Marco Polo trade finance initiative, developed by blockchain software

Bangkok Banks Joins Marco Polo Trade Finance Initiative

The Marco Polo trade finance initiative, developed by blockchain software startup R3 and trade finance technology firm Tradex has found a new investor in Bangkok Bank.

The idea of the platform is to simplify the trade and finance as well as to free it from all sorts of risks by applying Blockchain technology and discontinuing the traditional manual paperwork undertakings. The project is already proudly hosting a list of financial biggies including BNP, Commerzbank and ING as participants. The project had started very recently in the September of 2017. What’s interesting to note is that the project has already achieved its pilot stage before May end, 2018.

The hopes of the Bangkok Bank with respect to this project is to initiate the application of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) to “address the complexities and inefficiencies of trade finance,” as stated on the official press release by Ian Guy Gillard, the bank’s executive VP, respectively.

The platform has been delivered over TradeIX’s TIX open platform and has been built with R3’s DLT product Corda. The initiative has proved to be highly useful in a very small time. It accounts for solutions of end-to-end, real-time connectivity between the participants of a trade transaction and helps in limiting lags and disparities in data flow. The Marco Polo is focused on there primary ambits of finance and trade:

  • Risk mitigation
  • Payables finance
  • Receivables finance